I assume no one will read this, but good places to look for super-clever ways to reduce transistor count while maintaining good performance: - Early mainframes

I assume no one will read this, but good places to look for super-clever ways to reduce transistor count while maintaining good performance: - Early mainframes / room-sized computers (era of vacuum tubes and discrete transistors), especially at the upper-end , where there was enough budget to have modern pipelined and scalar architectures. - Cray X-MP and successors - DEC Alpha / StrongARM (referenced SA-110) Bad places to look are all the microcode architectures. These optimized transistor count, often sacrificing massive amounts of performance in order to save on cost. Ditto for some of the minicomputers, where the goal was to make an "affordable" computer. Something like the PDP was super-clever in cost-cutting, which made sense at the time, does much less to maintain performance. There's a ton of long-forgotten cleverness.